I am the Chief Insights Officer for Forbes Media responsible for managing Forbes' Insights thought leadership research division, as well as the Forbes CMO Practice. I am the co-author of "Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Services Firms Become Thought Leaders" now available on Amazon http://amzn.to/OETmMz as the previously published "In the Line of Money: Branding Yourself Strategically to the Financial Elite" available on Amazon http://amzn.to/AuHRN9
Bruce H. Rogers is the co-author of the recently published book Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Service Firms Become Thought Leaders

Michelle Zatlyn's CloudFlare Protects and Accelerates The Web

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder CloudFlare…

“Starting a tech company is not what most people from Saskatchewan do,” says the Canadian-born Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of CloudFlare.

Zatlyn, in fact, wanted to be a doctor. But when she considered medical school, she thought, “There’s all of these other things I like doing, too,” she says. So, after working at various companies and graduating from Harvard Business School, Zatlyn and two others—Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway–founded CloudFlare in 2009.

The company has been described as a digital bouncer that protects websites from malicious attackers. But it’s more than that. Its software also makes websites and other digital applications run faster and more efficiently.

Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder, Cloudflare

“Anybody with an API (application programming interface), an app, a website—any sort of web property—you set up our software, and we make it better,” Zatlyn says. “And that means anything from improving the performance to protecting them from a range of online attackers.”

For many users, the service is free. CloudFlare charges business clients for a host of special services, allowing it to provide its software to anybody else who wants it.

“Every day, over 5,000 new people sign up for CloudFlare,” Zatlyn says. “It doesn’t matter what sort of budget you have. We have enterprise customers who pay us anywhere from $20,000 to millions of dollars a year. And we have a $200-a-month service, a $20-a-month service and a free service.”

The company has an almost evangelical view of its mission to help smaller web properties that can’t afford the type of security and performance enjoyed by Internet giants like Google and Yahoo.

“We think we really are transforming the way the Internet works,” Zatlyn says. “What I like to say is we are the web performance optimizer and security for any property online.”

The company has raised about $72 million from venture capital funds such as Venrock, New Enterprise Associates and Union Square Ventures.

“We knew from very early on that CloudFlare was either going to be a big company or wouldn’t exist as a company because we have a lot of capital expenditure costs,” Zatlyn says. “We buy hardware, like routers, and switches and servers because we’re building out our own network to make the Internet better. I feel like our job—our team’s job—is to make sure that we reach our full potential,” Zatlyn continues. “I think that’s the sentiment that the board shares and everyone on our team shares.”

CloudFlare didn’t come about overnight. Zatlyn first met one of the company’s other founders, Matthew Prince, at Harvard Business School. “Matthew definitely is a big idea sort of person,” Zatlyn says. “And at school, he kept pitching me different ideas. And I kept saying ‘No. I mean, I think that’s a good business. But I wouldn’t be proud to get up every day and go work on that.’ ”

Prince kept pitching ideas, however. “We were on a school trip together in Silicon Valley,” Zatlyn recalls. “And he told me about something that he and Lee (Holloway) had started at his last company as an open source project, and it’s called Project Honey Pot.”

Honey Pot, which still exists, allows website owners to install software on their site to let them see who is trying to spam them or do other mischief.

“It’s like a honey pot for spammers,” Zatlyn explains. “I didn’t know a lot about website security, but Mathew told me about Project Honey Pot and said that 80,000 websites had signed up around the world. And I thought ‘That’s a lot of people.’ They had no budget. You sign up and you get nothing. You just track the bad guys. You don’t get protection from them. And I just didn’t understand why so many people had signed up.”

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